


A Girl's Education

by Selden



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Character Study, Female Character of Color, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-30
Updated: 2010-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of ficlets, mostly written for prompts at <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/31_days/">31_days</a>. Not written or intended as a cohesive set, but grouped here in reverse chronological order. Four Fire Nation women (and Zuko), under the sun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. THE BORDER BETWEEN RISING AND FALLING

**  
**

Written for prompt 'The border between rising and falling' at [31_days](http://community.livejournal.com/31_days/).

  


Two objective points are relevant: it reflects light efficiently; that is, it is bright, indeed dazzling; moreover, it does not tarnish (oxidize); it is unchanging through time, incorruptible.

Colin Renfrew, 'Varna and the Emergence of Wealth in Prehistoric Europe', in _The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective_ , ed. Arjun Appadurai, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.141-69, (p. 149).

 

 

 

The palace, it seems to Zuko, has shrunk down and settled in the time he was away, like sea-warped wood. From outside, from Mai's window, it looks just the same, the high wall, the sharp red roofs, towers stacking up against the sky. But inside it is empty in new places; things have moved around. They have kept some of his old things, the stuff he needs for ceremonies, but everything smells of camphor and cedar.

When he gets to the training ground, Azula is waiting for him. She is moving through an opening kata, left punch step back short kick pivot swing back, beginner's moves.

"What are you doing here, Azula?" he asks, marching out into the ground still in his silks.

"What does it look like, Zuzu? I'm here to _spar_."

"I don't need to practise with you," he says flatly, starts to turn.

She smiles, kindly.

"What you mean to say, Zuko, is that you don't need my help."

"But," she says, "you do."

Her eyes flick upward. Through the dark lattice-work of the upper gallery, something moves.

He cannot help it, he sucks in his breath. His good eye widens.

"Oh, honestly," says Azula. "It's not him. It's Li and Lo. But of course they expect a good show, Zuko."

She moves closer to him, her breath coming past him, her voice in his bad ear, abrupt and refracted as though heard underwater.

"After all, they've heard all about how you killed the Avatar."

He stands still, his mouth stiff.

" _Fine_."

He clenches his fists.

Azula puts a hand on his shoulder.

"Don't be long changing," she says. "I haven't got all day, you know."

  


When he is five and she is nearly four, they do their breathing exercises together in the long light training hall, the sun coming in wavy and dappled off the pond outside. They sit side by side, a row of candles in front of them, in and out, in and out. They are meant to breathe together; it is good discipline, although the servants kneeling behind them do not keep time. In the warmth, the mat slippery under him, Zuko's eyes droop; his head is too heavy, too big, his hands too wide, the ache of his morning training dropping away. He jerks awake. The flames in front of Azula are moving, in and out, higher and higher. Her face is still. Behind them, the servants rustle and whisper. A door slides shut as someone leaves to spread the news. For the next five months, before Zuko makes the candles rise and waver, she is the heir.

  


He loses, of course, coming down on a lick of her flame a moment too soon, the ground under him suddenly smooth and slick with heat, his footing gone. He thumps down on one knee, catches himself on the heel of his hand. Gets up, bows, hand over fist.

"Thank you." It is customary to say it.

Azula bows back.

"My pleasure, brother."

The wide dark sweat stains on her clothes are already wicking away into white rings of salt, her skin pale and matte as always, as if she is denser than most people, made of some different stuff.

Zuko steadies his breathing, in and out. Servants are hurrying out to repair the grounds, to fill in the gouges and hollows in the close-packed dirt, to sand down the grey patches of char on the hardwood railings.

Azula smirks at him.

"Don't look so down, Zuzu. I think you made a very convincing showing, personally."

She waves a hand towards the gallery.

"They'll have nothing to tell Father."

Zuko glares at her, opens his mouth. Closes it. Stamps off to change.

Later, walking back through the lower halls, he thinks of what he should have said. It is so perfect and cutting, it rests on the back of his tongue like a slide of steel. He sees Azula, at the end of a corridor, her hands clasped behind her, talking to someone standing out of sight; she must already have seen him, he knows.

By the time he reaches her, his reflection following him, slipping in and out as he passes shiny dark red pillars, the air thick and still this far inside the palace, she is alone. He comes up to her, pauses for breath.

"Oh, Zuko," she says, "did you need something?"

Familiar, close and constant as an old burn, she rests her hand on the back of his neck.

 

 


	2. IN ALL THINGS FOR THE EMPEROR’S USE PLAINNESS IS DESIRABLE.

 

In all things for the emperor’s use plainness is desirable.

Kenko, _Essays in Idleness  
_

  
After Ty Lee had thrown her arms around Mai for the third time in a day and handed her a flat pot of too-expensive hand-cream (‘because I know you don’t like lip-paint’), a flaking shell box (‘and I’ve kept it ever since that time on Ember Island, do you remember’), and a picture of the three of them she’d done when they were all kids and it was still ok to draw Azula’s fire in a blobby red-and-yellow arc over her head (‘it’ll get all messed up if I take it along’), she had hopped up into the ship, bag over her shoulder and face vague and white peering down over the rail with the other colony-bound passengers.

The stretch of oily grey water between ship and shore widened, became indefinite.

Mai turned away from the docks.

She headed back up into the upper reaches of the city, great plugs of acrid gutter-stench rising from gratings and children with grainy grey skin jumping and hooting past her, a lady on foot with no attendants, a woman in heavy silks who was old enough to be out training for war. An eccentricity, for this small moment.

 

Around the waterfront the streets were full of screeching metal, stiff gouts of hot air from pipes bulging overhead, the air gritty with smoke or soft with grease and steam. Further up the midday streets were dusty and taut with sunlight, little alleys belling out smells of clear broth and damp washing, knots of housewives haggling around stalls hung with wet red tags of meat. Mai walked rather slowly, and people let her pass.

 

When she was summoned to the palace she found the princess going through the seventh Dragon-Tooth kata, arms bare, lines of slick blue flame slamming through the air around her. Her instructors stood to one side, never taking their eyes off her, pale and perfectly unharmed. Mai folded herself down in the gallery where Li and Lo sometimes sat, twirling a knife round one finger, one leg laid out in line with the worn cedar boards. When Azula finished her set and came in, dry heat was rising off her in a quivering sheet, dust crackling around her on the floor. Mai inclined her head.

 

Azula paused and regarded Mai before rolling her shoulders and making for her dressing chamber. The maids at the door were so accustomed to Ty Lee accompanying her that it took a moment before they entered behind the princess, towels over their arms, heads bent.

Mai passed the time flicking a row of darts into the opposite wall. She was going back down the line splitting the darts with kunai when Azula returned, dry and crisp in her court costume.

Mai rose, bowed.

Azula flicked her hair back.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose it’s just you and me, now.”

 

“Just the three of us,” she had said two years back, taking the opportunity to poke through Zuko’s drawers, still full of carefully folded boy-clothes and scruffy sheets of military history, maps, dog-eared genealogical lists. Azula had reached to the back, pulled out a scroll.

“Love Among the Dragons,” she read. “Oh, _Zuzu_.”

She held it out to Mai, raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sure you could find a better souvenir,” Mai said. “If you really want to keep on looking, that is.”

Azula stared for a beat, quirked her lips.

“No,” she said, “I insist.”

Mai took the scroll. Behind them, Ty Lee shuffled her feet. Servants were clearing out the desk, its inkstone, brushes, pale jade water-holder. Dust soughed off into the air.

 

Now Azula stared out over the city, hands at her back, feet apart. Mai leant against the wall behind her, out of the wind, red arms crossed. Thin rills of cloud shook themselves out over their heads, coming in from the sea.

“I do hope that Ty Lee fits in at this circus,” said Azula. Her voice dripped with concern. “After all that trouble with her family, too.”

“I think she’ll manage.” Mai levered herself away from the wall, stood at Azula’s shoulder.

“She told me to tell you she’ll miss you.”

Azula sighed.

“Well, _naturally_.”

Her gaze slid over to Mai.

“Though I suppose she could see you, at least, if your father gets that Earth Kingdom governorship he’s been angling for.”

“I suppose,” said Mai. She looked out across the palace roofs, across the city. Green hills and black rock and red rooftops, the shoreline blurred with sagging smog. She slid Ty Lee’s pot of hand-cream out of her sleeve.

 “Oh, honestly, Ty Lee.” Azula rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe she gave you the same thing. For such a flighty girl, she possesses no imagination whatsoever.”

She looked across at Mai.

“And, really, blades are more your style, I’d say.”

Mai inclined her head, unscrewed the lid. The cream lay perfectly flat and unbroken, like milk or marble. She slicked a finger along the surface.

Azula held out her hand.

“Oh, very well, I suppose. Good cuticle care _is_ important.”

Mai passed her the pot. Azula took Mai’s hands in her own, slapped a blob of cream out across her palms, their precise, dead white callouses, their sharp creases shaped to her knives. She spread it out, rather inexpertly, circled it down into the skin. Shook her head.

“You’ll have to watch out, Mai,” she told her. “It’s such a strain on the joints. Your fingers will be stiff before you’re thirty, at this rate.”

She gave Mai her hands back, rubbed her own together, sniffed.

“At least it isn’t scented. Ty Lee knows that much.”

She rubbed, briefly, at her nails.

Mai folded her hands together, bowed over them.

“Thank you, Azula.”

In the hollow space between her palms, she held for an instant a bender’s heat, tight and close under the film of white cream.

 

 


	3. LET’S GO. LET’S DANCE THE TÉNÉBREUSE

 

Written for the prompt  'courage is morally neutral’ at [31_days](http://community.livejournal.com/31_days/).  
   


  
... ou en bas, cette indécente amazone dans son petit désert privé ...

Max Ernst, _A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil_ , trans Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1982), p. 27.

 

 

A traveller walks into a small bar in the Earth Kingdom, past the click and slap of old men playing Pai Sho by the street door, where round circles of vague green light glow against the outside wall, the sun coming through the bright dye of the unlit lanterns. He slides himself onto a stool at the bar, lets his pack fall to the floor, spins a bronze coin onto the counter and slaps his thumb down on it. He orders a cup of rice wine.

 

The woman behind the bar nods her head without looking round. She is levering thin white rings of pickled bamboo out of an earthenware jar with a pair of long chopsticks. She is tall, taller than most women in this scrubby little town, her short black hair caught back in a green tie. Her nails are ridged and a little lopsided, as though she has done much harder work with her hands than this and they have grown back in slightly off-centre. Her knuckles are a little swollen and whitened with scar tissue.

She flips a cup off the shelf, tips a measure of cloudy wine into it one-handed, turns to the traveller. He does not look up.

“Thanks,” he says. “Leave the bottle.”

 

She tells him the price. He leans back, cracks his knuckles, takes a long look at the little bar, the white-glazed bottles on the shelves, the dark wood tables, the narrow stairs leading up through the ceiling, the woman standing behind the counter.

She pushes a wooden board over to him, a fan of bamboo slices spread out across it, translucent and wet.

Behind him a wagon rumbles through the noon-heavy street, the old men bicker. Faint shouting swells in from the river, fades as the boats pass downstream. You can smell it in the bar, or maybe taste it, wide dank water in the heat.

 

“Quiet place you’ve got here,” says the traveller, making conversation.

The woman nods.

“Bit of a change from the big city,” the traveller carries on, running a finger round the edge of his cup. He has not yet drunk any of his wine.

“Ba Sing Se,” he clarifies. “The lower ring. It’s like an ant-worm heap. Anyone could lose themselves there.”

He clears his throat, brushes his broad hands off on his thighs. He is middle-aged, perhaps a few years older than the woman, with a round peasant’s face, short fingers with wide cracked nails, road-dust in his hair.

His accent is flat, coastal; the woman, you can tell, has come from the south, perhaps. A good long way, in any case. And from a good family, certainly. The manager says she adds class. Always a friendly word, though. A good worker, after the first few weeks.

“That’s where I was,” he says. “A little while back. Never seen anything like it, really. Boatloads of refugees coming in every day. More after the new Fire Lord came in, of course, people told me. Near two years now they’ve been pouring in from all over. Ant-worms, like I said.”

 

The woman loosens her shoulders, raises an eyebrow. She slides a knife out from under the counter, begins to slice her way through a round green lime-apple. Its scent comes out into the air, strong, sharp, a little swampy at the edges with ripeness. The traveller rocks his stool back, swivelling it away across the floor until he has to lean forward to reach the counter.

“Of course,” he says, “a place like this, it’s different. Peaceful. People notice new things.”

“Oh, yes?”

The woman’s voice is quiet, even.

One of the old men slides out a Pai Sho counter and cackles.

“He’s talking about you, Da Xia, or I’ll pay up half my tab. Your past has come to town, girl.”

He tips back a swallow of pale flat beer, gives a stagy leer over one shoulder.

“Or perhaps your man, hmm?”

The man cracks a token smile.

“’Fraid you’ve got that one wrong, old timer,” he says. He and the woman regard each other.

 

“I do have a message from him, mind you,” he says.

He rises, flicks out one arm across the bar so quick and smooth you might hardly notice, two fingers straight out. The woman moves as if to catch a falling child, a careful dart under and in, one hand around his outstretched fingers, the other flat against his chest. Her elbow catches the wine bottle; there is a sudden soft noise, a stink of sharp spirits. One of the old men makes a noise of disgust.

“Oh,” she says. “Please! Please, the doctor. He’s caught the sun.”

She lowers the traveller, face down on the counter. Flaps a spare hand at the men.

“Now, please,” she says, tightly. “I’ll take another look at the tab of whoever gets back first.”

They stumble out of the door on each other’s heels.

  
When they come back, though, the doctor holding his glasses on with one hand as they trot through the streets, the traveller has left.

A false alarm, the woman says, coming back out from the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up. He had the wrong person, in any case. The wrong drink, too, her mistake. And just a touch of the sun. This summer, it’s gone on too long, too hot.

She knocks a bit off their tabs, all the same: the manager will never notice. There is still a horrible stench of spirits and ripe fruit and cooking hanging all through the bar; the old men prop open all the windows before they settle back down.

 

A few days later a white, rounded body catches in the nets staked across the river down where it spreads out into a wide brown estuary. Fishermen in breech-clouts pull it onto their flat-bottomed boat, wrestle it face-up. It’s something they have done before.

There is a hole in the front of the traveller’s robe and a wet cooked hole in his chest, neat and round as the membrane on the cheek of a frog.

 

Back upstream, the woman packs her bags, moves on in across the Earth Kingdom, one of many on the summer roads.

 

 


	4. TEA SALT SUMMER

Written for the prompt ‘dinner party’ at [fic_promptly](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile).

 

 **  
**

General Iroh laid out the tea set on the tray before him, blobby salt-glazed stoneware on glossy black lacquer. The grass around it showed deep green, even in the filmy air of early summer: centuries of peaceful growth in the rich black soil of the palace gardens. Servants were laying out baskets of tiny dumplings, speckled green with sharp herbs, bland white rice balls with splinters of pickled chilli at their centre, neat squares of dark plum jelly folded into skin-thin gold foil. It was a little barbaric to take tea and food so close together, of course, but this was a special occasion. A picnic. Iroh nodded his thanks; the children came towards him through the hot pale gardens.

  
“Welcome to my dinner party, Azula, Zuko,” he said. "An august event!" He spread his arms, smiled broadly, bowed.

  
They inclined their heads politely, sat in unison, smoothed down their robes. Iroh sighed and began to prepare the tea.

  
Zuko ran a thumb down a drizzle of pale, foamy glaze and pursed his lips.

  
“This is ugly, Uncle,” he said. He flushed. “I mean, I just think you should have something more dignified. That’s all.”

Azula sipped her tea.

“Really, Zuzu,” she said. “You have no appreciation of the finer things in life.”

She gave her uncle an understanding smile.

“Peasant ware has such integrity, doesn’t it, Prince Iroh?”

Iroh hitched up the warmth in his bowl of tea. Steam fell up and out into the hot air. He had been a bluff young soldier, home from the war, bolstered with victory and the knowledge that finally his men were calling him Colonel, not Prince. He had taken tea in the spring gardens with his little brother, the air tacky with pollen, Ozai sitting still under the willow, his hands in his lap. His brother had been quite small; he had asked when he would be allowed to go to war.

And Iroh had laughed and told him there was time enough for that. Ozai should work on his bending, should get to know his own nation first. He kept on his tongue, claggy as a cheap rice cake, the truth, that the second prince had no need to prove himself. His job was to stay alive in case of accidents, to stay at home. Safe.

A small wind had rolled out over the gardens, smelling of coal dust and sea salt and early fire lilies. Iroh had thought of the girls in the city, grinning behind their sleeves as their tall sandals clacked over the cobbles, trailing tiny flames from their little fingers, spelling out come hither words in quick fire. It was a long time since he’d been back to the capital.

He had leant forward over the tea set, his hands around his brother’s as Ozai cupped his bowl, had coaxed him through the fine control needed to heat his tea without the smooth glaze crinkling out into little cracks. Ozai had done it on his first try.

Iroh leant forward now, smiled over at Azula. She was like her grandfather, they said, a prodigy. It had not seemed important, before. A prize for his brother, a credit to the family.

“Is your tea cold, my dear?” he asked.

She bent her head. Steam rose abruptly from her bowl.

“It’s quite all right, Prince Iroh,” she said. “Father taught me the trick.”

“Impressive, Azula. The fiercest hawk still needs to know how to build a nest.” Azula nodded, civil, bland. Iroh cracked her a smile, turned to Zuko. “Prince Zuko?”

“I’m fine, Uncle.”

Zuko’s eyes slid across to Azula. Jealousy, of course, understandable. But Iroh, two weeks home from war, noticed now that there was fear, as well.

  
Iroh swallowed, let his careful words about Ursa slip back down his throat. The palace was silent around them, the new regime some months old now, settled, banked down behind walls of whispers, the filigree of palace gossip. The pond across the garden showed a slice of white sky, the spikes of high roofs quivering a little in the empty water.

  
They ate only a little, even Iroh. It was getting hot.

  
Servants brought out bowls of aniseed-scented water, little nuggets of ochre sorbet sprinkled with nubs of pistachio, already sweating sweet yellow juice out across their green jade bowls. Zuko wiped his sticky fingers, surreptitiously, on his sleeves. Iroh, with relish, licked the last trace of sugar from his thumb.

"We should do this again some time," he said. "Now that I'm back."

He smiled across at Zuko.

Behind him, months and miles away in the Earth Kingdom, his son lay in the ground, somewhere under the inner wall of Ba Sing Se.

 


	5. THE GAME

Written for the prompt 'portrait of a family’ at [31_days](http://community.livejournal.com/31_days/).

  


ALL exercises were first deuised, and so in deede serued, either for games and pastime, for warre and seruice, or for suretie of health & length of life, though somtime all the three endes did concurre in one, sometimes they could not.

Richard Mulcaster, _Positions_ (London: 1581), sig. Giir.

 

  
On the evening before her daughter’s seventh name-day, Ursa goes to pick up her flute from its stand and finds the outer bamboo has been stroked away. There is nothing left but a core of lacquer and stone dust, a crisp dark tube laced with a little soot. When she touches it, it buckles away under her fingertips, slippery as a butterfly wing.

There is a screen by the inner wall and a tall hanging at the end of the room. Ursa does not look at either of them when she scoops the crumbs of lacquer into her palm, slides open the window, and lets them flake away over the courtyard.

Her hands smell of sour ash. She lays them out before her on the cedar wood window frame, long and pale, the notches and lines of old bending scars almost invisible. Her power may be only moderate for one of her lineage, barely adequate for bearing royal heirs, but her control is exquisite. You can see how she came by it, too, in each little seam and quirk of scar tissue.

She knows she could not have burnt away that flute and left its centre whole.

They are stringing red lanterns up over the courtyard, row after row of bright silk globes, abrupt and solid in the evening light. She waits, watching the servants clamber, toss the lanterns around like hulking earthbenders throwing boulders.

Groups of servant women clatter across the courtyard holding long bundles of festival incense, platters of glossy sweets, tangles of brass bells and red string, piles of silk hangings printed, she guesses, with the characters for long life, prosperity, glory. It is important to put on a show. She can make out half her daughter’s name, folded over on the topmost banner.

One servant carries what looks like a collection of simple masks for the acrobats, a cluster of pale half-faces bouncing at her hip.

It takes almost until sunset for her daughter to come up beside her, as if she has just found herself in the music room. Ursa smiles down at her, decides not to press her about the whereabouts of her attendants. They have probably been searching the corridors and gardens for a while. She lays a hand on her daughter’s cheek, cradles her jaw.

“How many flutes did you go through, Azula?” she asks. It is not what she meant to say, before she looked into her daughter’s face.

Azula purses her lips, crosses her arms.

“Some,” she admits. “It is an exceedingly delicate technique.”

Ursa raises an eyebrow. Even her little daughter does not normally use such terms of her own accord.

“It is very impressive, my dear,” she admits. Azula looks away, out over the lanterns. “I am very proud of your hard work,” says Ursa.

She tweaks her daughter’s ear.

“But why would you do something like that to a flute, silly? They are very old and precious, you know. It takes a master months to make them just right.”

Azula looks up at Ursa. Her face reconstitutes itself, quick as the closing of a butterfly’s wings, so that Ursa is not sure what she has just seen. If she had seen anything.

Azula is full of open, guileful contrition. She clasps her hands behind her back, sweeps one foot in front of the other.

“I thought they were just ordinary, Mother. Sorry.” She gives Ursa a broad smile. “I promise that I won’t do it again. On my honour as a princess.”

Ursa lowers herself to her daughter, holds on to her shoulders, tight and wiry from her training, the metal thread of the brocade chilly and coarse. Azula is perfectly still in her grasp.

“My dear,” she says, “I know your father has found you and your brother the very best teachers. And of course he takes a special interest in your lessons, Azula. But if you want to improve your precision, I think I can help.”

She runs her hands down Azula’s arms, folds her daughter’s hands between her own. Raises a tiny tuft of fire from each index finger.

“You see,” she says, “it can be a game.”

She spreads her fingers, Azula’s hands between her palms, and has the flames hop from finger to finger, one two three four five and back again. It is something she did with both her children when they were very small.

One for a kingdom  
Two for glory  
Three for a phoenix  
And four for a story.

And one two three four five dragon, with a little puff of fire up over their heads.  
She looks across, smiles at her daughter.

Azula takes a breath. The fire goes out.

Below them, Ozai enters the courtyard, a procession of high ranking bureaucrats and military officers trailing behind him. In the failing light, their faces bob above their robes in odd shapes, pale slivers, as they turn to whisper and nod at each other. It seems almost as though they might clatter to the ground if they stopped moving, a collection of intricate parts carved in white wood and ivory.

The light is dim in the room behind Ursa and her daughter, the instruments on the walls a row of soft glints and gleams. Inner doors slide open, shut, attendants chatter. Zuko, somewhere in the near corridors, raises his voice.

“Thank you for your instruction, Mother,” says Azula. She bows her head and removes her hands. Gives Ursa a wide smile.

“Can I go and say goodnight to Zuko now?”

“Of course you can, my dear,” says Ursa.

Azula darts off, slipping out through the main doors like any small child bent on mischief, on being very especially quiet.

Ursa stands at the window. The footsteps of the procession hollow as they reach a wooden walkway, then fade out. She considers her daughter’s smile.

She reminds herself of how long it took for Azula to come to her. Both sides of their family are renowned, after all, for something like patience. She bows her head.

She knows that when she first touched the burnt lacquer, she had not been able to hold back her slight intake of breath, the widening of her eyes.

A sudden shout comes down the hall, Zuko in urgent, blustering indignation. Azula’s laughter. There is a silence, negotiation, perhaps. Zuko’s voice comes again, dictating terms. Azula wants to borrow something, that much is clear. Attendants intervene, clucking, a door shuts off the noise.

Ursa looks up, curves her lips. She had always wondered what exactly the inside of a flute looked like, but it was not so very strange after all. She raises her hands, angles them exactly. Little spits of careful fire hit every single lantern, row after row, leaving no space for darkness.

 

 


	6. THEY'RE LIVING THINGS TO ME

Written for the prompt 'the sleep of reason produces monsters' at [31_days](http://community.livejournal.com/31_days/).

 

 __Blindfold, in the dark, with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from the other. They’re living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand.

Henry James, _The Spoils of Poynton_.

 

 

Sharp red shadows slammed out across the courtyard as guards raised up the banners, stiff slabs of silk. The sky was grey with heat, the jutting roof-ridges of the palace whittling out into nothingness against the glare. Ladies fussed and fluttered in the dark hallway behind the royal family, their robes crisping across the floor, fans jerking the air back and forth.

 

Prince Ozai stood beside his father, his wife a step behind him, their daughter in her arms. Their son, almost three years old now, stood at one side, between the dowagers Li and Lo, clutching unsteadily at their robes.  His mouth was wet and sticky; the ladies had been giving him sweets. Ahead, the courtyard was massed with nobles, palace functionaries, military staff, their heads bowed. Fire Lord Azulon raised a hand.

“I am here,” he said, “to witness the naming of my granddaughter.”

The princess stepped forward, her hair sheeting briefly white as she passed into the sun. She held the child out to the waiting Fire Sages, who gathered to dab her hands and feet and mouth with wet red oil. The baby squirmed in her mother’s arms, mouth quirking ominously. Azulon raised a whisper of fire in his hand, almost invisible in the sunlight. The Fire Sages stepped back.

 

The Fire Lord tipped his hand out over the younger princess. His flames licked up the oil without raising so much as a flush on her skin. The baby blinked, stilled. A good omen. Her mother raised her before the crowd.

“Azula,” announced the Fire Lord, “Fifth of the blood.”

He turned, nodded at his son, swept back into the glinting dark of the palace. The crowd rippled as he left.

 

Ursa was smiling down at their daughter, wiping at the last traces of oil with a finger. The world around Ozai turned abruptly small and hot, a tight red snarl of palace towers and courtyards and powdered old ladies. His wife would be one of them someday, mouthing at sugared squares of plum jelly in the second best apartments, their daughter behind her laughing into her sleeve. The sun twisted above him, screwing itself down into the sky. His son looked up at him, eyes squinting against the light. His daughter mouthed at her mother’s finger, tiny and pale with heat. The crowd waited.

 

“It’s a fine name,” his wife said, absently enough. She touched his sleeve.

The prince bowed his head, lifted a hand to his daughter’s face. Then he turned back through the rustling women into the palace, following his father. The banners dipped down into their shadows. The crowd broke apart behind him.

 

A smooth skin of heat stretched out again over the courtyard, over its empty dark stone. A touch at the fire in any master bender, like knuckles brushing on a cheek, a hand on a shoulder, a kiss at the edge of the mouth.

 

Ursa stood on the black basalt, her daughter in her arms. The baby was hot, restless, little tickles of fire lining the fat creases of her hands. Ursa lifted a finger, sent the flames whispering out over the courtyard.

Up into the loose wide sky.

 

 

 

 


End file.
